PITTSBURGH—Nicole Wong, a veteran of Google and Twitter who last year became the White House's first chief privacy officer, will be the keynote speaker for Carnegie Mellon University's Data Privacy Day program on Jan. 29.

Wong, who joined the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) as deputy U.S. chief technology officer last June, will speak at 2:30 p.m. in conference room 6115 of the university's Gates and Hillman centers. The talk is open to the public, as are all of the day's activities.

Data Privacy Day is a global event held each year to empower and educate people to protect their privacy, control their digital footprint, and make the protection of privacy and data a great priority in their lives. CMU's event is organized by the university's Master of Science in Information Technology — Privacy Engineering program, a first-of-its-kind program launched last year in response to growing demand from industry and government for trained professionals in this area.

In addition to Wong's keynote speech, CMU's commemoration will include a privacy clinic from 11:30 a.m. to 1:30 p.m. in the University Center's Connan Room, where privacy engineering students will provide practical advice on how to choose privacy settings on Facebook, smartphones and other sites and devices, how to manage Web browser cookies and ways to block online tracking.

Wong, who holds law and journalism degrees from the University of California, Berkeley, was deputy general counsel at Google for eight years, where she earned the nickname "The Decider" for her role in setting censorship and privacy policies. She joined Twitter as its legal director in November 2012 and was tapped the following spring for the OSTP post.

As a lawyer in private practice prior to joining Google, Wong represented a number of media clients including the Los Angeles Times, Walt Disney Co., Microsoft, Yahoo! and Amazon.com.

Following Wong's talk, a Privacy Research Show & Tell session will feature CMU research on privacy. The session will be from 3:30 to 5 p.m. in the atrium of Newell-Simon Hall. More information about the day's activities is available at http://privacy.cs.cmu.edu/news/.

Additional support for the event is provided by Wombat Security Technologies, a CMU spinoff that offers leading-edge computer-based privacy and security training products.

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Nicole Wong (pictured above), a veteran of Google and Twitter who joined the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy last June, will speak at 2:30 p.m. in conference room 6115 of the university's Gates and Hillman centers.